This article is the first of our new series “Global Web Design“. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We start today with an article about web design in Russia. We will continue with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso) upcoming weeks. Hence, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed2311 for more similar posts.

If you’d like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us2332 and we’ll discuss the details.

Web Design in Russia

The land mass that is one-sixth of the Earth is always surprising. As the founder of one of design-related magazines in Russia (Designcollector.net), I am happy to present the hidden force that is Russia. I won’t dwell on the classic stereotypes but will rather look at the creativity flowing through.

The era of professional and commercial online design started in Russia about a decade ago. We’re now seeing an increase in professional design and development. I won’t concentrate much on the history of Web design in Russia; that has been happening for ages. Like everywhere in the world, Web design came to Russia as a modern way to present any kind of information to an audience online. So, principles such as simplicity, accessibility and eye-catching design have been cultivated for several years.

Web development as a profession was relegated to the elite for years until geek heads and artists took it over. For a few years there was a boom of home pages and tiny corporate websites that were built with any regard for the end user. This trend ended thankfully, in large part due to the highly scaled websites that came out the original and still unique studio founded by Artemy Lebedev, which has produced more than 760 websites.

Today, the professional scene of web design consists of thousands of freelancers, studios, agencies and large media companies, along with offshore and outsourcing businesses. I won’t do a “Top 20″ this or that rating, but I will try to touch on the most established parts of Russian Web design, including agencies, freelancers, portals and so on.

State Of Things

Measuring a Web design market by the products of its agencies is not quite fair. Russian agencies have also proven their management technologies and quality-control processes. As someone once said, “The best way to understand a new city is to go to the central market.” And in Russia, Web design is still concentrated in the hands of freelancers and small studios. To get a better picture of freelancing in Russia and the bordering Ukraine, I have asked two freelancers to talk about their work.

I spoke with Gennady V. Osypenko, who is the rather famous Kiev-based designer working with companies from Eastern Europe (he is also known as Genn5), and Dmitry Sulliwan6, a Russian freelance Web designer.

Q: Could you please describe the life of a freelancer, developer and designer?

Gennady Osypenko: You do work, get inspiration and then do more work: that is freelancing. For sure, you meet clients and collaborate a lot. Compared with an office job, you travel around the city a lot, wasting your time on that. Freelance designers become the center of the project, and even oversees developers, acting as a kind of art director. Designers in offices just do the routine, yelling at account managers and listening to art directors. Hence, I am a freelancer, and I do not remain at one job for long.

Dmitry Sulliwan: The work of freelancer is very interesting. You get new experiences from working with different companies on diverse projects, and some of those experiences may not even be related to design. Different cultural and professional events make the life of the freelancer easier and allow him to share his experience and understand the value of his job. A freelancer’s life is good because he manages himself, which allows you to get more pleasure from your work. But that does not mean you work any less. From my perspective, freelancers work one-and-a-half times more than permanent contractors. The only barrier to getting the best results is laziness. Hence, there are not a whole lot of true professionals in the freelancing space.

Genn: We hold festivals and different advertisement exhibitions. The only exhibition I have visited abroad was the designers market in Budapest (Sziget). Web-oriented conferences were very popular last year. Not all of them were about design, but some were useful and interesting anyway. I’ve done things like short master classes at some of them, and I plan to do that in future; I’ve been invited at the end of October to say something about being a freelance designer. I like talking about what I do to people who are eager to listen.

Dmitry: There is a good set of conferences in Russia. I can name the last ones: DesignAct in Moscow, and the 404 Web Designers Conference in Samara. Many Russians also visit foreign events in Europe and around the world.

Genn: I get inspiration from everything around me. That is a typical answer, but any object could lead my imagination to the unique and perfect idea. It is like in the House M.D. series on TV, when House is stuck on a diagnosis and suddenly gets inspiration to solve it. I got inspiration for my last project from the Wipeout Pulse game on PSP. I played it for hours and eventually got an idea for a website architecture.

Dmitry: Design books, magazines and Internet resources. Nowadays, we have a nice bunch of local design blogs on which they share their experiences and thoughts.

Genn: I don’t know the situation in the market, but I know for sure that a lot of people want to make a website or establish an online identity. As a freelance designer or creative process supervisor, I prefer more interesting and specific projects, ones that don’t reflect the whole market situation.

Dmitry: True designers, like any other good specialists, cost a good amount of money. The question is whether there are enough positions. There are many agencies and studios, and so fewer of them would be able to provide a good experience or take on interesting projects.

Genn: When you see an ad on every (literally every) open surface saying, “Site for $100,” how could you regard Web designers or anyone connected with website creation to be high level or sophisticated? Luckily for us, customers who really need complex, functional websites understand that they have to work with professionals. Just because you can illustrate something does not mean you are a Web designer. If you can organize the craziest information in a usable and readable way, and then decorate it, then you are a Web designer. So, we could say that being a Web designer is both high level and not high level at the same time. Actually a lot of Web designers also create perfect identities and motions, so I’d better call them designers, even though we create beautiful websites.

Dmitry: Unfortunately, not always. Mostly because people still confuse Web designers with system administrators [Interviewer note: That’s true, because most Russian Web designers can do Shell and Apache tasks, hosting stuff and email management and develop a reputation for mixing them together. When a Russian customer orders a website, they want it 100% with domains, parking, hosting, support. This is the main issue with the profession.] But in most IT and related companies, the position of Web designer (and developer, UI designer and visual designer) is valued and respected because of the high-level skills and usually complex work involved. These days, the Web design profession has cut out its own place in the market and is recognized for it.

Q: There are rumours that many designers in Russia still use tables, and that most designs are 100% fluid, regardless of screen resolution?

Genn: Are you referring to HTML coders and Web developers? As far as I know, the trend is to use semantic code and follow accessibility and other compliance standards. One Ukrainian HTML coder even coded his own blog in HTML 5 and met all standards requirements, even if only for a few browsers. So they’re all progressive and forward-looking. As for 100% fluid width, there was an assumption that all websites had to be 100% wide and fill the whole browser window. As I explain in my training and master classes, the width of websites should fit the requirements. As I can tell, incorrect use of fluid widths is declining and used in only specific instances.

Dmitry: Those are only rumors. Professional Web developers follow standards and adopt the latest trends in coding. Fluid width is a distinction of Russian Web development and a common standard. Good fluid layouts are usable, dynamic and look good at different resolutions. And good Web developers can avoid common issues, such as those related to floating and typography, by using fluid width.

Genn: It’s a common joke that all designers hate Cyrillic letters. The letters really look odd if you want to create something fancy, but we adapt to it. I like the story of one logo made in the US for some candy trademark. The designer decided to add a feature to the logo and name, so he made Ã¶ out of o. Years later, he found out that Scandinavian designers hate umlauts, but he used them as decoration and it worked well. We have to abstract and not see hieroglyphs in letters but rather understand their nature and use them in the best way.

Dmitry: Cyrillic type has far-reaching issues. The main illusion is that Cyrillic type is not better than Latin. That issue is outdated. We have great Russian typography designers who do amazing type that fits certain designs well and win awards. Nowadays, even Web editorials order custom typography for their titles. Typography on the Web has become user-friendly and readable.

Genn: Yeah, there might be some difference between design in Ukraine and in Russia. As long as designers are not regarded as high-level specialists in the community, then customers will continue to believe that they are perfect designers, too. So, they will always want to move this a bit, repaint that a touch, and change the whole layout five minutes before the deadline. With any project, I try to be as specific as possible in explaining almost every pixel (or dot, if we are talking about print) so that the customer can see why the product is the way it is. It’s surprising, but it works more than half the time. The other problem is that no one wants to part with their money, so you could end up waiting some time before getting money for a project that is done, implemented and working.

Dmitry: Russian customers still do not understand that designers do not blindly follow their ideas but are rather themselves highly motivated workers who want to produce the best results for the given job. Whoever the customer, whether foreign or local, every time it is a minor war. Designer-client relations are not stable in Russia and are not even regulated. We have no professional unions and, of course, no support from the government. Newcomers to freelancing are often not aware that some customers are unfair, but they find out when they do not get paid.

Q: Do you see any remarkable differences between Russian designs and ones in the US and Western Europe?

Genn: I am happy that distinguishing between designs in Russia and those on the worldwide scene is becoming harder and harder. The designs here are unique in their own way, but then the work of every good designer is unique.

Dmitry: As mentioned, the main difference is fluid layouts. Good Russian websites have a clear and semantic structure, and they don’t follow strict grids, which make the layouts dynamic and fresh. They use modern Web technologies, combining unobtrusive JavaScript with clean xHTML.

Genn: I don’t know. I didn’t like physics in university much. When I ask myself that question, I start reading British science fiction. It doesn’t answer the question, but it has a lot of funny jokes.

Dmitry: Briefly, the situation is good. Russian Web designers are always looking forward and no longer do clumsy, heavy Flash-based websites. We have started to concentrate on usability and accessibility and become more integrated with the rest of the professional world.

Showcase Of Creative Agencies

Let’s turn now from the freelancing life in Russia to the FMCG32 and promotional sectors, where Russian creative agencies live. They do their best to impress consumers with their products and corporate websites. The results are meant to impress visitors and make them spread the news like a virus. Here are some agencies that have gained public attention as well as prestigious awards, such as the FWA, ADCR and even the Cyber Lions shortlist.

Showcase Of Web Agencies

These guys create great websites and form the foundation of the Russian Web design scene. They’re not necessarily the best; they just do their work better than most.

As mentioned, ArtLebedev Studio57 is still the largest studio in the Russian market, based on portfolio size. To date, it has done more than 760 websites, 725 graphic designs, 113 product designs, 44 interfaces, 32 environmental designs and 30 presentations. This record is still unbeaten, and its brand is something of a guarantee on the Russian Web design scene. Also worthy of mention is its Bronze Cannes Cyber Lion award (the only studio in Russia to win it), and its internship program, which helps international students realize their ideas.

Web Developers Online

The Web developer scene in Russia is well represented on blogs, too. We’ll cherry-pick the best ones here among the dozens that exist. On them, Web developers and intelligent commentators share their thoughts on various topics and host friendly communities. Vadim Makeev and Constantine Osnos chose these ones for us.

The particular nature of Russian communication has produced these huge community platforms, where any topic can rise or fall according to the “vox populi.” Everything IT-related, from Web 2.0 to Web development, is discussed on Habrahabr136. The best place to talk about Russian Web standards is Webmascon magazine137. And Deforum138 is the place to share your creative work and welcome a crowd of decent, and sometimes obscene, critics.

Would you like to see more similar posts on SM?

Hopefully you’ll find this new format inspirational and interesting. What do you think? Please let us know and comment on this article! Your feedback is very valuable for us and it helps us to meet your expectations. Thank you.

Stay Tuned and Get in Touch!

This article is the first of our new series “Global Web Design“. Over the next months we’ll be covering various continents, featuring web developers and web designs from different countries of the world and taking a close look of what is happening in the web design scene worldwide. We start today with an article about web design in Russia. We will continue with Ireland (Lee Munroe) and Brazil (Fabio Sasso) upcoming weeks. Hence, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed2311232 for more similar posts.

If you’d like to prepare an article for this series, please contact us2332 and we’ll discuss the details.

About the author

Arseny Vesnin is the founder and creative mind behind Designcollector.net234, a blog that showcases designs created by artists from Russia and other countries of the world.

L.E.

Aleksey

Hello, lovely community of SM)
I’m wondered of this article, I realized that I don’t know Web Design in Russia at all!
Over some years of learning web development I haven’t read any article in russian, and I visit only a couple of russian web sites usually.
Well, Russia has a very good future in web development), I really like it, and I want to make some points.
I’m agree with kimee, that art style is different, I think that’s because of the difference in graphic design in Europe and Russia. We can see that interfaces are often complex and there is a lot of Flash in russian web design, and on the other hand such terms as “simplicity”, “clean”, “plain” are the leading principles in Europe web design (the most distinctive designer is Mark Boulton, I think).Kemo, everything is OK with Cyrillic alphabet), although I had similar opinion as you before. I often notice that my friends are to learn typography a little bit more), and I can suggest some articles, as well as sources mentioned there (maybe it will be helpful for somebody):Compose to a Vertical RhythmIncremental leadingA Guide To Web TypographyTypographic Contrast and Flow

SM
I think that Alex had in mind Бюро Пюрогова)
And, finally, I want to ask you, lovely SM, to write an article about online graphic design schools, that can study people, who are not graphic designers (as me), to get skills in that area, I would really appreciate it, as many others, I’m sure.
And, it will be interesting to see an overview of Web Design in New Zealand)

Michelle

acidl33t

Amanda Fazani

Outstanding! What a wonderful and inspiring collection of design! I’m personally thrilled to see such a good article (with well chosen examples and commentary) which is focused on a particular area of the world.

Being a Brit, I’d LOVE to see an article here on Smashing about British web design. We have some truly talented designers and to read a similarly inspiring article which is focused on home territory would be a certain bookmarked site!

NETJET

Kevin

misha

Thanks for the article. As I can see, the main idea behind all Russian designs mentioned here — “to look luxury” or “to look design-rich”. Instead of western designs, which are trying “to look clean” or “to look usable”. It’s quite understandable, because web-design in Russia is still “young”, and designers try to show customer, what he pays his money for. A “good design” in Russia is still a kind of “luxury product” (not like bread or toothpaste), so customers want more “luxury” and more “imperial” style in design. I think, we’ll see the same trend in Arabian or Turkish (or Asian) web-design :).

Martin

As usual, and understandably, most of the design work featured is show-off stuff, rather than practical everyday web design. The artwork is fantastic, but little of it has any application to the needs, and budgets of the type of clients that I work for. They might be willing to pay for a fancy design at the outset, yes, but generally they hit a point in the financial cycle during which they can’t afford the ongoing cost of maintaining it, such as the cost of new design work each time they want to accommodate an unexpected requirement that has not been allowed for in the exisitng layout.

Bartosz

Most of the works are actually impressive, however the showcase doesn’t tell us much about the overall condition of web design in Russia – simply because these websites were mostly made for large companies, or for designers themselves. The real factor is the everyday-design for regular customers – medium and small businesses. Anyway I was really happy to read the interview and hoping to see the next one soon.
BTW, thumbs up for Russians and Ukrainians for amazing Opera’s popularity in their countries – over 20% of browser market share. Greetings from Poland :)

galinka

Amazing collection!
Illya Mikhailov is a freelancer? Since when? Thought the Federation Tower website was created under ArtLebedev studio.
Unfortunately not many can really read it and see the sense of each detail on these web pages. Western webdesign lack sense badly. Russian webdesigners rock! They give some life to their works.
Love you guys ^-^

ed

The thing is even small business in Russia like to show of like a mega Ferrari corporation :)… We don’t have this thing as a cheep design to sell cheep stuff like you guys in europe. Even second hand cloths shop makes a website like hugo boss. its a paradise for us illustrators in Russia :)

alex

Patrick

Lots of flash, lots of magazine-style graphics and layouts, but there don’t seem to be much in the way of content-heavy sites or particularly usable sites. The designs in this showcase are a bit monotonous and same-y.

0

132

Mark Lee

Human brain recognizes graphical information more rapidly than textual. I think it’s logic to use graphic and illustrations when you need to show people something or tell them something quickly and efficiently. After all, not all web sites are there to tell War & Peace.

Julio Andrade

lelique

mojitopl

to 62. >> it is not that Russian design is young, That is pure bullshit. Russina people are like this – they love luxury, richness of decorations and Russian webdesign has reached the masterlevel of webdesign ever. Because their websites (the best ones of course) are still clean, readebla, functional and also colourful, rich, decorative and full of eye candies. This is the pure Russian way of thinking implemented on the top high level in webdesign. This is very unique style of webdesign. I was always suprised by Russina webpages, the high level of artism in them. And to cap it all i must admit that in general I personaly dislike Russians as a nation, their rusted hegemony – they caused my nation so much harm and still are breaking any rules. But their webdesing is the best.

marx

Great informative article! Thanks!
As I live in Kyiv ) still have to note – most of designs based on visual presentation – a heavy nice pics. But we have to remember – that is Web, not a street gallery and sometimes transport can be random and slow, and sometimes there are people which doesn’t see well and can’t recognize what that beautiful color splash does. Also more and more people got to use a mobile gears with a tiny screens. I guess why bright pictures dominate – is a willing to impress studio clients. Western style of design – is willing to be good for site audience.

John E.

Bennish

I was glad to see Vlad Gerasimov at least put a comment in here – it seems he wasn’t asked anything for this article! It’s a beautiful article, but Vlad is kinda synonymous (to the western world at least?) with Russian web design.

Silver Firefly

I love the Russian style, it is different from the stuff the US and the UK churn out on a daily basis. I think I will try to study more Russian web design and perhaps web design from Eastern Europe. Anyone who slates what we’ve seen are clearly jealous.

mayank rana

lego

DW03

Весьма приятно видеть на авторитетном портале видеть работы наших дизайнеров и веб-разработчиков. Наш уровень пока еще не такой как за рубежем, но как видно за последние годы мы быстро набираем обороты.И это радует. SM респект за обзор ))
It is rather pleasant to see on an authoritative portal to see work of our designers and web developers. Our level for the present not such as others, but apparently during the last years we quickly grow. And it is excellent. SM respect for the review))

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